Annette Messager Collectioneuse

Messager created this four-panel work for possible inclusion in the art magazine Avalanche. In her accompanying text, she dubs herself "Annette Messager, Collector" and describes how and why she collects pictures. Gathering advertising imagery, magazine clippings, and personal ephemera into idiosyncratic taxonomical groupings, she offers a meta-lesson in the nascent art of appropriation, which would emerge in full force later in the 1970s. Messager organized her collection into thematic albums, eight of which are excerpted here (from top left): "My Approaches," "My Tears," "My Illustrated Life," "My Witness Pictures," "Voluntary Tortures," "Collection in Order to Find My Best Signature," and "My Collection of Castles."

An English translation of the artist’s text is below:

Annette Messager, Collector
In my bedroom, I keep certain works of the "collector," as opposed to works from the studio, where I call myself Annette Messager, artist.
I like the title of "collector" because, besides the idea of the collection that it implies, it can also evoke the image of a woman whose life is a little dubious and not very serious. In my bedroom, I want to possess and appropriate for myself the life and events I know about; I continuously plunder, gather, organize, select newspapers, magazines, various documents that I find and condense into numerous collection albums.
I would like everything in my house to be neatly arranged, securely ensconsed, but my apartment is always cluttered and messy. This is why I have decided to undertake only organized activities defined by the place where I live.
The newspaper you flip through at home gathers all the dramas, the dreams of people, all these important and trivial events put on the same level, elements of an emotional nature, ambitions, disappointments, my jealousies, or, for example, my latest sewing stitch.
These documents, which form a kind of packed diary of an old maid or a disabled adolescent, remain anonymous and secret and compact.
Like every collection, which is an individual's appropriations from the outside world, mine never stop growing richer and are always outgrowing themselves in time. The collections, about sixty at the moment, create connections among themselves and often change. I allow myself to change the form of each album from one to the next, because I don't want to be stuck with a certain look and I prefer to be contradictory. Neither finished nor definitive, my collections, which almost always flow from the collective, are for me the best possible preservation and can thus be seen as my own life, illustrated. —February 1973